Mark Thoma is a distinguished academic. His take on the vital lessons the banking collapse and the poorly executed bailout are similar to my own.

The overarching lesson in all of this is that getting government out of the way isn’t always the best path to prosperity. The crisis should have taught us that government has an essential role to play in preventing problems from occurring in the economy, and in correcting problems when they occur despite our attempts to prevent them. But, unfortunately, due to poorly executed policy, political posturing, obstructionism in Congress, and ineffective rebuttal from the administration, that’s not the lesson that has been learned.

He maintains a largely academic web page, which is worth a read. He also has a Facebook page which I recommend you join.

This is an example of his rhetoric.

This man has full sized lectures available on You Tube. He is an expert on econometrics, but don’t worry he is not always that high on academic difficulty when he speaks or writes.